From a poor immigrant to an associate professor at Harvard is the log-cabin to white-house story of Raphael Demos, associate professor of Philosophy, who is rated year after year as "top-notch" by his admiring students.

At the age of 19, Professor Demos arrived in this country from Greece, with a college education and two years of teaching in Asia Minor behind him. When he stepped off the boat with his brother, they had but $150 in their pockets.

He had heard of Harvard, the University of William James, and vowed to go there. For his room and board he washed dishes, and to acquire spending money every morning saw him at the Lampoon building, sweeping out the wreckage of the night before. "That was my first impression of the average Harvard undergraduate," he says, "and it was by no means a good one. But when I gave a D to a Lampoon president several years ago, I felt better. However," he hastens to add, "he and I became great friends later."

The ever-present pipe of the professor comes out of his pocket automatically whenever he becomes engaged in a classroom discussion. He listens carefully to his opponent, and then darts back at the questioner with an array of arguments which support his point of view. He prefers small classes to large ones because there is more opportunity for talk back and forth with his students, but the mixed classes of summer school he dislikes. "It's better to keep the boys and girls separate," he insists.

On Sundays he can always be found sitting contentedly on his front lawn, colorfully attired in a pair of bright blue slacks, digging crab grass from his garden with his two lively youngsters. So it is from personal experience that he is able to draw his frequent analogies from child behaviour. But in spite of a busy life of teaching and acquiring knowledge, he envies men of action. "The life of a philosopher," he says, "is the life of the mind."

Inevitably closer to his thoughts than his love of ancient Greek Philosophy is his vital and personal interest in the plight of his fatherland in 1942, and in the affairs of his countrymen both here and abroad. If the Greeks can survive the war and the ravages of the Axis, he has great faith that they have a future in store for them as glorious as their past.